A Meet of Tribes (A Shade of Vampire #45)(54)

She gasped and immediately withdrew her hands from the pot as if avoiding a flame. She cursed under her breath, then shot a death glare my way. Her gold and emerald eyes glinted angrily.

“You could’ve killed me!”

“Sorry I startled you, but how could I have killed you?” I asked. “Is gardening in Eritopia lethal?”

Anjani took a deep breath and stood up with her eyes closed, as if mustering all the patience she could find. Judging by the way her nostrils flared, she didn’t have that much.

“These are not ordinary flowers. They’re extremely rare and extremely poisonous,” she explained. “The toxin is deadly and spread throughout each petal. A single touch can kill me in under a minute.”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” I replied, mentally chastising myself. “Why aren’t you wearing any gloves, if they’re so toxic?”

“I am a succubus. I do not fear death. I dance around it. Gloves are for weaklings. I was raised to collect poison.”

I nodded, processing that information. An awkward silence ensued. We stared at each other. I felt bad for my ignorance of Eritopian flora and had no idea what to say next. The prospect of her dying from that flower still blared in my head.

“Just try to make yourself heard before you walk into the greenhouse next time, that’s all. Just in case I’m doing something like this again,” Anjani conceded. “You couldn’t have known, anyway.”

Relief washed over me, reminding me of just how easily my emotions were manipulated by the succubus. I had never felt so vulnerable before, and I wasn’t sure how to handle it. I’d been raised to be strong and fierce, and she seemed to effortlessly break me down without even trying that hard.

“What are you doing with those flowers anyway? Although I must say, the term ‘flower’ is far too pretty for how deadly these things are,” I quipped, hoping to relieve some of the tension.

She collected the poisonous blossoms in the cloth and pushed the flower pot back under the large iron table where it belonged.

“The flowers are called Death’s Kiss,” Anjani explained. “Their poison is the only thing known to expel a Sluagh out of its host and instantly kill it.”

I’d heard about the Sluaghs, but I didn’t have enough knowledge about them to fully understand what she was talking about. She looked at me and most likely noticed my blank expression.

“Aida described her most recent vision involving a meeting between Sluaghs and some of my sisters. They are deceitful creatures, filthy parasites feeding off the dead bodies of my kind. I cannot bring myself to trust them. So, I’m preparing for the worst-case scenario in which I may have to kill as many of these worms as possible,” she added.

“What are the Sluaghs, exactly? I didn’t get too many details from my sister yesterday.”

“Sluaghs are parasites, basically. They live in the swamp waters and look like overgrown worms. They are extremely vulnerable in their true form, hence why they take over dead bodies of incubi and succubi. They animate the corpses like puppet masters and feed off them,” Anjani elaborated. “A mature Sluagh can occupy a dead body for a long time before the flesh dries up and the host becomes uninhabitable. It’s a strange process that we have yet to fully understand, but the Sluaghs have evolved to this point over millennia. For a long time, we didn’t even know they existed. We feared our walking dead instead.”

She placed the cloth bundle on the table and started cutting the red leaves off a small rounded bush in another pot. One by one, she placed them inside a mason jar, which she labeled.

“Your walking dead?” I asked.

“Well, yes. A long time ago, back when the world was still young, we buried our dead out by the river. We believed that the water fed the ground and that our dead helped nourish it further, giving life to flowers and trees. In some parts, the Sluaghs ran through the rivers. They would often dig into the bank and find the bodies. The next day, our villages were attacked by our dead relatives, walking and hissing and hungry for our flesh.”

I let out a sigh, picturing one such village and the horrible scene that Anjani had just described. This had once been a regular part of Eritopians’ lives. It gave me chills.

“It just so happened, a thousand or so years ago, that there was a succubi tribe living on the southern slope of Mount Agrith, where Death’s Kiss flowers grow in abundance. They had just settled there, after having been driven out of an incubus citadel. One of the two waterfalls of Agrith poured into a river we call Sol, and its waters were infested with Sluaghs, but the succubi didn’t know that yet.

“Soon enough, they lost a few sisters to a pack of shape-shifters and recovered the bodies. They buried them in the bank, as usual. The dead sisters came back at night, with black eyes and rotten teeth, demanding the flesh of the living. The wind was strong, and it blew over the Death’s Kiss bushes bordering the camp. Some petals flew off and got stuck on the Sluaghs’ new bodies. The poison instantly entered the flesh and expelled the worms. They died a most agonizing death, and the bodies of the sisters were once again still and lifeless. It was then that we learned about the Sluaghs’ true form and what they really were.” She put a lid on the jar. “Soon after, we began to study them and their ways. They can hold on to a body for years, cheating their way through unnaturally long lives.”